Healthmaxxing, Marriage & Stock Valuations

At its best, having an Oura ring makes you fitter, happier, and, sure, even more productive. You may walk more, lift more, sleep more, and drink less. You will be hard-pressed to find a physician who thinks there’s anything amiss in the previous sentence.

However, the obsession with winning the measurable games of health can encroach on the less measurable games of life. The best way to sleep more is to see fewer friends in the evening. The best way to lift more during the week is to eliminate social lunches to protect your midday gym time. To become a measurably enhanced self often means eliminating your less quantifiable sources of meaning and happiness.

The ring can improve your life. But its form of self-improvement often pulls you away from other people. This left me with a nagging question. At what point is it unhealthy for me—for anyone, for all of us—to be this obsessed with health?

The share of people who drink hit an all-time low last year, according to Gallup, whose data go back to 1939. While many social changes happen slowly, the attitude shift against alcohol has been quite sudden. The decline of drinking is one part of a larger cultural phenomenon, the rise of the Enhanced Self.

The Enhanced Self is the evolution of medicine, technology, and consumer culture from an emphasis on curing illness to an obsession with optimizing normal, healthy life. We see this with the rise of GLP-1s, the explosion in biohacking with peptides, and the continued growth of supplements.

More Americans are using therapies not only to cure what is wrong with them but also to improve what is not wrong with them. At the layer of leisure, the tendrils of the Enhanced Self touch the white-hot rise of fitness in American life.

At the layer of biology, the Enhanced Self incorporates the belief that the human body is akin to a single-issue hardware device, whose owner should obsessively seek to extend its operating life beyond its scheduled date of obsolescence through relentless work and eagle-eyed neuroticism.

At the layer of sociology, the Enhanced Self is inseparable from the decline of socialization. While running clubs and morning workouts are booming, nightclubs are closing and parties are withering. Young Americans spend about 35 percent less time socializing and 70 percent less time attending or hosting parties than they did at the beginning of the century.

The age of the Enhanced Self is different from health movements of the past, not only because many of its elements are distinctly of the 2020s, including peptide shots, social media, and biometric scanners, but also because it does not particularly seek to build anything outside of the self.

For a long time, abstinence was associated with religion or personal histories, such as addiction recovery or pregnancy. But in the new health culture, abstinence is not about faith or addiction; it is about bodily perfection. On health podcasts and videos, influencers and science communicators talk about alcohol’s association with sleep scores, skin clarity, energy levels, cardiometabolic biometrics, and executive function.

The fruits of the Enhanced Self movement will include fitter people, with less disease, who live longer lives. But what are the costs? Young people, who are seeing the highest increases in exercise time, also say they have fewer friends than any cohort ever; that they spend more time alone than any generation on record; and that they are more anxious and depressed than previous groups.

Our bodies want us to be social. Research finds that “super-agers” (individuals over 80 with the cognitive function of people decades younger) shared little in common except for an unusually robust history of friendship and other social connections. A 2025 analysis of 500,000 participants in the UK reported that living with a partner and frequently visiting family had roughly the same relationship with longevity as exercise.

While the pursuit of health does not have to cleave us away from others, the project of delaying mortality is often a solitary undertaking.

Adam Mastroianni notes that over the past few decades, high schoolers have steadily drunk less, smoked less, and fought less. In the same period, serial killers have all but vanished, blockbusters have grown less original, design has grown less distinctive, and cars have gone monochrome. Mastroianni ties these together with a theory he calls “the decline of deviance.” As people get richer and the world gets safer, deviance falls, because “life is worth more now.” When people think that they might live to be 100, the strategy for every life-game is the same: play it safe.

Bryan Johnson’s wellness company, book, and Netflix documentary are not called “Live Better” or even “Live Forever.” It’s called “Don’t Die.” The moment-by-moment obsession with death may extend our lives, but when we cannot stop practicing this lifespan arithmetic, many of us will slip out of the thick appreciation of the here and now and approach life with all the verve of a lonely risk-assessment officer at a life insurance firm.

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In general, women tend to live longer and healthier lives than men for a variety of reasons, including greater health consciousness and a tendency to avoid risky behaviors, but also genetic and hormonal factors. At 65 years old, U.S. women are expected to live for an additional 19 to 21 years, while for U.S. men, this number only stood at around 16 to 18.5 years.

However, married men aged 65 gain almost 2.5 years of life expectancy over their unmarried counterparts of the same age, boosting their outlook on life significantly. The role women play in marriages as planners and facilitators of medical care as well as advocates for healthy habits becomes clear when looking at divorced and widowed men’s life expectancy.

Married and never-married women, on the other hand, have a more similar expected lifespan. But even if a women is divorced or widowed, her life expectancy is still somewhat above that of a never-married woman, highlighting how women benefit from the overall advantages of marriage rather than just their spouse. These come in the form of so-called marriage protections, like adopting better habits, better mental health outcomes and better social connectedness. They are also often explained by so-called marriage selection, the idea that those individuals who manage to get married are already starting out with a better outlook on life.

Of course, this data depends on the quality of a marriage. A poor marriage has the opposite effect on lifespans due to increased stress and burdens.

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Some insights about the wealthy, from 20 years working in wealth management with high-net-worth clients:

Money doesn’t really change people. It magnifies what’s already there. Anxious people become more anxious. Generous people become philanthropists. Spenders ramp up spending on a never-ending hedonic treadmill of delights. Sibling disputes become expensive multi-year legal battles.

The children of successful, wealthy families often internalize enormous pressure to excel and perform at high levels. They know they have no excuse to fail and every opportunity to succeed. They also learn that no one will ever extend them a lick of sympathy.

Wealthy people aren’t better at managing money. They struggle to save; they get scammed; they don’t stick to a budget or know how much they spend. They have no special investing prowess.

They still worry about money – about running out, about spoiling their kids, about making the wrong investments, about not making the most of it. Wealth does not alleviate money anxiety; in fact it can exacerbate it.

They are very susceptible to peer pressure and groupthink. This applies to lifestyle choices and investing trends. The most popular conversations and think pieces were inevitably along the lines of “what our other clients are doing.”

Rich people mostly own the same ETFs and index funds as the rest of us. There are no inside investing secrets. They don’t time the market or trade actively – if they listen to their advisors. Some love a flashy PE fund or venture capital stake to talk about on the golf course, but alternatives are generally more status flex than return enhancement.

Wealthy parents worry unnecessarily about hammering a “strong work ethic” into their kids. Whether childhood is rough or smooth, some people develop it, and others just don’t. Similarly, some kids have a tendency to over-save, while others spend or give too much. This happens in poor and rich families alike.

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Almost every metric of U.S. stock valuations are at or above their 2000 bubble high peak:

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The price to earnings ratio of emerging market stocks were over 100% higher than U.S. stocks in 2006-2007. Today emerging market p/e ratios are almost 50% lower than the U.S.

The MSCI Emerging Markets Index captures large and mid-cap representation across 24 emerging-markets countries, with roughly 1,200 constituents, and covers about 85% of the free-float-adjusted market capitalization in each country. The country roster includes places like China, India, Taiwan, South Korea, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, Mexico, and South Africa, among others.

It’s “free-float-adjusted market-cap weighted,” meaning constituents are weighted by the share value actually available to public investors, and larger companies carry more weight.

Korea and Taiwan now account for nearly half of the MSCI Emerging Markets Index, roughly double their 2020 weight, making the index increasingly sensitive to U.S. tech dynamics. As a result, EM equities have become more correlated with the U.S. AI cycle, diminishing their role as a portfolio diversifier.

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AI summaries are the likely driver of search’s decline as an online traffic source and the recent uptick in zero-click searches.

An increasing share of searches ends in no links being clicked.

Temporal Chauvinism, Attractiveness & Germs

It’s difficult to escape “temporal chauvinism,” which is the feeling that the time we’re living in now is the most significant or terrifying one ever, simply because it’s the one we happen to be around to experience.

Everything about our situation as humans pushes us to overrate the importance of our own era. Apart from anything else, present-day unknowns feel the scariest, because all previous unknowns eventually resolved themselves into knowns (every prior prediction of the end of the world turned out to be wrong) while future ones haven’t occurred to us yet.

It is very, very, very, very unlikely that the literal apocalypse is coming anytime soon. We’re almost certainly not living at the end of human civilization. Frankly, it’s pretty unlikely we’re even on the cusp of unprecedented levels of disruptive change. The truth is that we’re probably living through times that future historians will think of as broadly normal.

The point is not that life is safer and more secure than the heralds of the apocalypse would have us believe. It’s the opposite: that human existence is intrinsically unsafe and insecure, all the time. Anything could happen at any moment, the future is unknowable, one day you’ll die, and some people end up having vastly more traumatic encounters with these realities than others.

Yet there’s a stunning bit of good news hiding in all this, because if radical insecurity about the future is just how life is, then by definition, we’re already coping with it. Look back at your life to date, and you might even conclude that, so far, you’re handling it all rather brilliantly.

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The graph below shows what people say they want or what is important to them in a partner (red line). The “X” marks show how much each trait correlated with people’s actual romantic evaluations or how important it was in real life.

The biggest discrepancies were in (1) being attractive, (2) being a good lover, (3) being sexy, (4) having a nice body, and (5) smelling good. Perhaps people are simpler than we realized once we look beyond surveys.

The discrepancies run the other way too. Being (1) a good listener, (2) patient, and (3) calm and emotionally stable were all overrated in stated preferences.

It’s a little confusing that the red line rises from left to right, suggesting increasing importance, but since these are rankings, a higher number actually means less important (1 = most important).

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Research has consistently shown that younger siblings fare worse than firstborns on lifetime earnings, educational achievement, mental health and, for women, teen pregnancy. The later the birth order, the worse the stats get. Why?

(1) Less Quality Time with Parents

First-born children average 20 to 30 more quality minutes each day with parents compared with a second-born child of the same age. The deficit amounts to about 3,000 fewer hours spent on reading, playing, talking or other activities with at least one parent for younger siblings. That’s roughly comparable to more than a year of schooling between the ages of 4 and 13.

The gap only widens as more kids enter the picture. That means the youngest siblings get far less quality time overall because whatever is available gets split among more children.

(2) Germs

Studies find that the tiniest organisms have a profound impact on a child’s future. Exposure to respiratory viruses before a baby’s first birthday, when immune systems are immature and before most childhood vaccinations, consistently predict reduced earnings, education and health decades later.

Researchers estimate that half or more of the gap in life outcomes between older and younger siblings can be attributed to pathogens inadvertently brought home by older siblings.

The disparity is stark: Younger siblings are two to three times more likely to be hospitalized for acute respiratory conditions than their older siblings during their first year of life. After that, when younger children generally begin attending group child care, the hospitalization gap disappears. Older siblings, the data suggested, bring home viruses to vulnerable infants with no other significant sources of exposure.

To show that higher disease exposure causes harm later in life required more work for researchers. They had to control for parental income, education and employment across municipalities with higher and lower infection rates. Yet the pattern was clear: earnings, education and mental health outcomes all declined as community disease exposure rose.

In the first months of life, roughly 85 percent of an infant’s calorie intake goes toward neural development. A serious infection can reduce how much a baby eats and divert calories away building a brain. If a child is very ill during that time, it might impact brain development by diverting biological resources to fighting an illness.

RSV was singled out as a key pathogen. It caused roughly one-third of all respiratory hospitalizations among second-born children with no protective immunity from first-year exposure against RSV hospitalization during later childhood.

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Status, Procrastination & Hair Transplants

Your brain is running status calculations all the time — looking for who is capitulating to whom, who commands attention, who has the nicest stuff, who seems confident, who people want to be around, etc, etc. This is un-installable software in your brain.

Every time you feel a pang of envy scrolling through someone’s engagement photos, every time you adjust how you describe your job depending on who’s asking, every time you feel a flush of pride when someone important remembers your name — that’s the program running. You can intellectually reject status games all you want — your brain is unconsciously still playing them.

The important thing is that status is completely relative. It’s not calculated against some universal benchmark. It’s calculated against whoever else is in the room. A surgeon has high status in a hospital but not necessarily at a skate park. Which is why status is so deeply entangled with money. Money is the most legible, most portable status signal we have. Every financial decision you make is shaped, consciously or not, by where you think you stand relative to the people around you.

There are two fundamentally different kinds of status. The first is the respect and admiration you get from people who actually know you — your friends, your coworkers, your community. Your standing on the local ladder. It’s earned through relationships, rooted in a specific place and a specific group of people. And it’s the kind that actually predicts whether you’re happy. When your local standing goes up, your well-being goes up. When it drops, it drops. The effect is stronger than income, education, or job. Having money only really feels good insofar as it makes the people around you respect you more.

The second is what most people mean when they say “status” — wealth, income, job title, clothes, etc. The stuff people can more readily see (and quantify). It’s much easier to compare your salary to someone else than it is to determine if you’re a better partner/friend/daughter.

This kind of status barely moves the needle when it comes to happiness. People adapt to new income levels almost immediately (hello, hedonic adaptation). You get the raise, you feel good for a month, your reference group shifts, and you need more.

The pursuit of status has less to do with material comfort than with love — that what we’re really chasing when we chase rank is the assurance that we matter to someone. That we won’t be abandoned. That we’re worthy of attention and care. Which makes the whole status economy feel even crueler, because the version of status our current system sells — the one made of metrics and money and things that scale digitally — is the one least likely to deliver the thing we actually want.

The whole system runs on a kind of collective amnesia about what actually matters. We build the metrics. We optimize for the metrics. We forget why we built the metrics. We assume the metrics are the thing instead of a proxy for the thing. And then we wonder why we feel empty.

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There’s one piece of advice I’m confident applies to basically everyone: you should make sure your psychological center of gravity your real and immediate world – the world of your family and friends and neighborhood, your work and your creative projects, as opposed to the world of presidencies and governments, social forces and global emergencies.

This will make you happier. It will make you more meaningfully productive.

Keeping your center of gravity immediate and local means treating the world of national and international events as a place that you visit – to campaign or persuade, donate or volunteer, to do whatever you feel is demanded of you – and that you then return from, in order to gain perspective, and to spend time doing some of the other things a meaningful life is about.

One very good way to tell that your center of gravity is out of whack is when it feels like you spend a lot of time inside the minds of far-off strangers. To follow the news isn’t merely to follow the activities of Elon Musk, but to feel overly familiar with his twitchy and emotionally reactive inner life as well. This isn’t healthy.

We need a certain psychological distance, some cognitive privacy. There’s some appropriate level of such privacy between me and my wife, for goodness’s sake, so you’d better believe there’s one between me and Musk.

Returning your center of gravity to your immediate world means remembering that “the way you want the world to be” is something you can live, here and now, not just something for which you advocate or argue. Your immediate world isn’t only somewhere you come to recharge, before heading back to the arena. It is the arena.

I’ve found one tried-and-tested mindfulness exercise to be helpful here. Become consciously aware of your feet – of their position in space and their temperature, their contact with your footwear or the ground. Come out of your head for a moment, and especially out of other people’s heads. Here you are. Here. On the ground.

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A two-minute trick to outsmarting procrastination, from a new book titled How A Little Becomes A Lot:

Choose something you’ve been putting off and commit to doing it for exactly two minutes. Set a timer: When it goes off, you can stop – no guilt, no pushing through. You’re not changing your life overnight – you’re just proving that beginning doesn’t have to be overwhelming.

The limits of our willpower and the importance of structuring our environment to help us accomplish what we want. To change our behavior, we need to change out surroundings. Instead of saying “I’m going to refrain from eating Fig Newtons today,” it’s better to put the Fig Newtons on the top shelf behind a box of rice crackers.

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The men who can afford it are shelling out up to $20,000 to get hair transplants, which have become harder to detect and ever more precise.

Men with more modest means can find packages that fly them to Turkey and deliver the same procedure for around $3,000 — or they can start with the cheapest option of all, which is going on finasteride. Prescriptions for the drug in the United States tripled between 2017 and 2024, a time when telehealth companies were taking off, just as men started spending hours a day staring at their hairlines on Zoom.

Feeding that anxiety is a mass-marketing campaign teaching men the same brutal self-scrutiny that women have long been trained to perform. A typical male in his 20s or 30s is likely to receive a flood of ads and shout-outs on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube and the livestreaming platform Twitch for hair-growth products that appeal to men their age.

Young men who have come of age in the time of the manosphere are prime audiences for endless reels from influencers — some of them exceptionally buff, some of them funny, some of them with millions of followers, who are trying various treatments in the hope of regaining a full head of hair. The hair-loss influencer Zeph Sanders has over one million TikTok followers tracking his “hair journey.” The ubiquity of this kind of content makes losing one’s hair no longer seem inevitable; going bald can now feel like a choice — a conscious decision.

The advertising and those influencers are conveying the message to young men that they should start taking finasteride young; in their early 20s. The approach fits into the broader “prejuvenation” trend, in which young men and women are using lasers, fillers and products like Botox to fend off signs of aging before they start, rather than doing damage control when degradation is already well underway.

Parents come in asking about finasteride for their teenage sons, looking to make sure they get “all the best they can have in order to succeed in life.” Young men are also coming in on their own for help keeping their hair. There’s no new epidemic of hair loss, but there is an epidemic of men freaking out about it.

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Here’s a number that should change how you think about retirement: 12.

That’s how long the average healthy 60-year-old has before their mobility, energy, and independence start to significantly decline. Not before they die… before life gets noticeably harder. You have more time than you have energy. More years than you have vitality. And if you don’t understand that distinction, you’ll waste the good years preparing for the declining ones.

The cruel irony is that most people spend the first decade of retirement living as they did in the last decade of work—carefully. You saved for 40 years. You delayed gratification. You were prudent, responsible, cautious. And that got you here. It built the nest egg. It secured your future. But if you keep living that way, you’ll waste the very years you saved for.

Your 60s are not a rehearsal for your 80s. They’re the main event. And if you don’t spend (not recklessly, but intentionally) during the years when you can still fully enjoy it, you’ll reach 78 with a big bank balance and a long list of regrets.

If you’re reading this in your 60s, you’re in the window. You still have your good years ahead of you. You haven’t missed it. But the window is finite, and it’s closing.

If you’re in your 50s, you have even more time, but you also have a chance to shift how you think about retirement before you get there. To plan not just financially, but experientially. To design a retirement that front-loads the living, not the saving.

The Longevity Hack, Exceptional Adults & DNA

My father didn’t meditate, didn’t track his steps or explicitly “exercise,” and never once uttered the word “mindfulness.” Yet he lived to 92, dying at home after a very short bout with brain cancer, having been visited by his children and 11 grandchildren in the 10 days between diagnosis and death. And my mom is still going strong at 92. She still has her sense of humor and her political engagement but no “diseases that will kill her,” as she puts it.

I have spent my professional life studying what makes people live healthier and longer. I have analyzed data sets on longevity the world over and reviewed hundreds of clinical studies. I have heard numerous new claims about supplements, diets and tech devices that are supposed to extend life. But nothing I have read in the scientific literature explains longevity better than the lives of my incorrigibly social parents, Benjamin and Marsha Emanuel.

My father was a pediatrician who spoke five languages and was comfortable talking to anyone and everyone. He routinely talked to strangers, offering suggestions based on his well-honed diagnostic skills.

Whenever we stopped in a restaurant he would start chatting with the people at the next table within five minutes—asking about their jobs, their families, where they were from and what they liked about the place they lived. If no one was at a nearby table, he would strike up a conversation with the waitress.

To a modern eye, this might seem overzealous. But people responded to him. They felt seen, not interrogated. There was no agenda—just my father’s insatiable curiosity about people. One time, a casual chat with another father in a park ended with an invitation for our whole family to dinner at their home.

My mom was also incurably social. Our house was constantly filled with the people she collected. She was great at making our teenage friends feel understood, with warmth and empathy. When her kids went off to college, she finished her training as a therapist and went into practice.

For years, I did not fully appreciate what I was witnessing. To me as a kid, my father’s endless chatter was an embarrassing quirk of his personality. And my mother’s welcoming of strangers into our home just seemed, well, normal. Only after decades as a physician and policymaker did I understand that my father and mother had unintentionally but eagerly adopted one of the most powerful health interventions ever discovered: human connection.

Study after study now confirms what my father and mother intuited long before science caught up. Social relationships, both the deep ones and the fleeting exchanges, reduce stress hormones, lower blood pressure, reduce inflammation, strengthen immune function and make you happier. They may even slow cellular aging.

An analysis by the Health and Retirement Study, which enrolled over 20,000 Americans older than 50, found that over the next eight years, people with the most close friends (an average of 7.8) had a 17% lower risk of depression and a 24% lower risk of dying compared with people who had fewer close friends (an average of 1.6).

Similarly, Harvard University’s Study of Adult Development, which followed people for over 80 years, found that “the people who were happiest, stayed healthiest as they grew old, and who lived the longest were the people who had the warmest connections with other people.” By contrast, social isolation is as dangerous to longevity and cognitive decline as being obese. My father didn’t need PubMed to know that being interested in people kept him not just alive but vibrant and energetic.

Years later, I came to see that impulse—to notice, to care, to connect and help—as the very definition of wellness. My father’s memorial service overflowed with friends, former patients and neighbors, each one with a story about how he’d helped them, laughed with them or simply made them feel less alone. Every Thursday, meanwhile, my mom still has lunch at the deli with “the boys”—friends she has collected over the years.

It has taken me many years to grasp that wellness is inherent in the community we inhabit. My father’s conversations with strangers weren’t just good for him but for the people he engaged with. My mother’s weekly lunch is both good for her and for all her friends. Sharing time with others is beneficial for all involved.

If there is a “longevity hack,” that is it. Forget the cold plunges, red lights and fad-driven supplements. Call a friend. Chat with your neighbor. Ask the Uber driver or grocery checkout clerk how their day is going or how their holidays were. When I think of my father and mother now, I realize that health isn’t something you achieve in isolation. It is something we all create together.

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From athletes like Simone Biles and Michael Phelps to scientists like Marie Curie and Albert Einstein, identifying exceptional talent is essential in the science of innovation. But how does talent originate? Did the most talented athletes, scientists, and musicians reach peak performance relatively early or late in their career? Did they forgo mastering multiple sports, academic subjects, and musical instruments to reach world-class performance in only one?

An analytical review looked at published research in science, music, chess, and sports and found two patterns: Exceptional young performers reached their peak quickly but narrowly mastered only one interest (e.g., one sport). By contrast, exceptional adults reached peak performance gradually with broader, multidisciplinary practice.

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Nearly two decades of studies from multiple independent labs suggest that a father’s gametes shuttle more than DNA: Within a sperm’s minuscule head are stowaway molecules, which enter the egg and convey information about the father’s fitness, such as diet, exercise habits and stress levels, to his offspring. These non-DNA transfers may influence genomic activity that boots up during and after fertilization, exerting some control over the embryo’s development and influencing the adult they will become.

The findings could end up changing the way we think about heredity. They suggest that what we do in this life affects the next generation. What a father eats, drinks, inhales, is stressed by or otherwise experiences in the weeks and months before he conceives a child might be encoded in molecules, packaged into his sperm cells and transmitted to his future kid.

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The average team valuation by league (in billions):

The top 10 most valuable pro sports teams in the U.S.:

North American sports assets (RASFI) returns vs. other asset classes, and why private credit wants to get more involved in the industry.

Consciousness, Being Present & The Fragile Gift Of Life

The night before my brain surgery, my wife and I sat across from each other in wordless stillness. Hours before surgery, with death still in the room, I didn’t feel fear. I felt something quieter. Stranger. I felt connected. To my wife’s eyes. To my breath. To the weight of my feet against the floor. To the wind brushing the window. Even to our cat, oblivious, licking her paws in perfect peace.

Upstairs, in a crib painted white, our 18-month-old daughter lay sleeping. I imagined her face at 5, at 15, at 40. I hoped she would know how deeply I loved her. And in that moment — that unbearable, radiant moment — I was, for perhaps the first time ever, conscious.

Not in the neurological sense. Not in the academic or philosophical sense. But in the raw, elemental sense of being awake to the miracle and the absurdity of existence. Alive to the texture of being.

Leading up to surgery the world had never looked so alive. Every detail sharpened, sacred. Time no longer moved. It hovered. Held. The future dissolved. The past let go. All that remained was one long, luminous moment. And in that moment, I was tethered — to my wife’s hand, to the stars, to everything. I was, finally, conscious.

I considered the paradox of being most awake at the edge of unconsciousness. The strange intimacy of being stripped down to nothing: no ego, no schedule, no ambition. Just breath. Presence. And the knowledge that everything is about to change—or end.

At that moment, I was not thinking about business plans or unread emails. I was not anxious about the past. I was not hungry for the future. I was only there, suspended, waiting. And in that waiting, I was more myself than I’d ever been.

I laughed to myself in the hours before the anesthesia took hold: This is what it means to be fully human. This is what it means to be conscious.

I lived, and in the weeks following surgery, I experienced what doctors call “survivor’s euphoria.” A clinical term, woefully inadequate. It wasn’t just euphoria. It was revelation. It was a reawakening. It was a second birth.

The world opened itself to me like a wound and a gift. I smelled color. I tasted air. I watched dust motes floating in the light and felt tears rise. My daughter’s laugh shattered something inside me, and I let it. I held my wife in the dark, listening to her breath, feeling the hum of her life, and I cried because I could.

I no longer chase productivity the way I once did. I no longer confuse urgency with meaning. I try, imperfectly, to pay attention. To listen more than I speak. To feel what I feel, even when it hurts.

There is a kind of consciousness that lives not in thought but in presence. It asks nothing of us but awareness. It demands no degree, no ideology, no spiritual badge. Only that we pay attention. Only that we look — at our children, our lovers, our trees, our coffee, our clocks — and see them as if for the first time.

Happiness, Single Women & Perspective Before Dying

Raising Vikings: Danish Secrets To Raising Happy Children. After 12 years of living in Denmark, ranked as the second happiest country on earth, a mother wrote about what she learned living there:

Denmark’s social rule of janteloven – the idea that “you’re no better than anyone else” – keeps everyone grounded. Its education system is rooted in equality, with children calling teachers by their first names and collaboration prioritised over competition. There’s a flat hierarchical structure and high taxes help redistribute wealth – not a terrible plan since more equal societies are happier and healthier.
Danes trust their neighbours, institutions and even strangers, with 74% believing “most people can be trusted”. So, babies are left to nap outside in their prams, children roam freely and people sell secondhand clothes from “trust stands” outside their homes.
The Danes are masters of the work-life balance, with a 37-hour work week as standard and OECD figures showing that the average Dane puts in only 33 hours a week. The result? Lower stress and higher productivity.
Friluftsliv, or “open-air life”, is deeply ingrained in Nordic culture and spending time in nature has been shown to reduce stress.
One of the greatest gifts from our Danish years is the habit of eating together. This is non-negotiable – TV off, phones away and everyone at the table for a home-cooked meal, proven to improve mental and physical health as well as our relationships. Thanks to a short working week, a daily family dinner is entirely possible in Denmark and tends to be eaten early, something our metabolism and gut health apparently thank us for.
Nearly half of Danes volunteer, contributing to their communities through clubs, events and schools. If Denmark taught me anything, it’s that small acts of service build stronger communities.
The Danish art of cosines meant slowing down, switching off and sharing quality time in relaxed surroundings (accepting that the best evenings don’t involve wifi). Danes priorities daily moments of joy.
Vikings are allowed to take risks, learn from mistakes and develop independence early on. From two-year-olds dressing themselves to eight-year-olds cycling to school alone, there’s a collective confidence in giving children freedom in Denmark, which helps them flourish. A phrase beloved by my children’s teachers was that adults should “sit on their hands” – ie do nothing and let children work things out for themselves.
Danish minimalism goes beyond design; it’s a way of life. From clothes to home decor, the approach taught me the beauty of having fewer things, of higher quality.

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But a good question to ask is, What Exactly Do Country Happiness Rankings Measure? For the eighth year in a row, Finland tops the “happiness” league tables — but that doesn’t mean its citizens are feeling the joy.

The country ranking itself stems from the the “life evaluation” metric: “Please imagine a ladder with steps numbered from 0 at the bottom to 10 at the top. The top of the ladder represents the best possible life for you and the bottom of the ladder represents the worst possible life for you. On which step of the ladder would you say you personally feel you stand at this time?”

Considering this, the most prominent factor that determines whether citizens are “happy” might have more to do with how satisfied they are with their immediate surroundings, rather than how they’re feeling.

While the World Happiness Report takes into account life satisfaction, it lacks one crucial joy-determining factor: emotions. The 2024 Gallup Global Emotions Report focused on respondents’ positive and negative emotion; including how often people laugh, smile, or learn something new, as well as how often they feel pain, stress, or anger (the “Positive Emotions Ranking” column below):

Finland ranked in 25th place overall for feeling positive emotions specifically, and until recently, had one of the highest suicide rates in the world. What the happiness ranking could speak to, then, is the Finnish custom of “sisu,” or inner strength, which means people rarely complain about their problems… or, for that matter, place themselves low on the life ladder.

Another factor contributing to life satisfaction that the report highlighted was meal sharing. The growing number of people eating alone in the United States — in 2023, about 1 in 4 Americans reported eating all their meals alone the day before, up 53% from two decades prior — was said to have contributed to a decline in national well-being, as the US ranked 24th overall in the report, the lowest position it’s ever held.

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American women have never been this resigned to staying single and they’re giving up on marriage. They are responding to major demographic shifts, including huge and growing gender gaps in economic and educational attainment, political affiliation and beliefs about what a family should look like. More women than men are attending college, buying houses and focusing on their friendships and careers over dating and marriage.

Women throughout history rarely questioned whether finding and securing a romantic partner should be a primary goal of adulthood. This seems to be changing. Over half of single women say they believe they are happier than their married counterparts. A rise in earning power and a decline in the social stigma for being single has allowed more women to be choosy. They would rather be alone than with a man who holds them back. The focus has shifted toward self-improvement, friendship and the ability to find happiness on their own.

48% of women say that being married is not too or not at all important for a fulfilling life, up from 31% in 2019. Marriage rates for both men and women are in decline, in part owing to less pressure to pair off and higher expectations for a would-be match. Dating apps make people feel like there might always be a better option. They view looking for a marriage partner the same way that you view looking for a job candidate.

The challenges of finding a romantic partner have been made more complicated by a growing divide in education and career prospects between men and women. 47% of American women ages 25-34 have a bachelor’s degree, compared with 37% of men. A bachelor’s degree increases net lifetime earnings by an estimated $1 million. Women are doing comparatively well when it comes to education and their early years in the labor force, and men are doing comparatively badly. That creates a mismatch, because people prefer to date in terms of comparable education or income.

Men’s economic struggles seem to be having the biggest effect on women without a college degree, whose marriage rates by age 45 have plummeted from 79% to 52% for those born between 1930 and 1980. Young men without a degree are struggling so much as a group that there simply aren’t enough with steady jobs and earnings for non-college women to date.

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Nine months ago, Jonathan Clements shared with readers that he’d been diagnosed with an incurable form of cancer. It was devastating news, especially for longtime readers, many of whom regard Jonathan not only as a journalist but also a friend. I count myself among them, so I was grateful that Jonathan agreed to sit for an interview to share more about his background, his early years and his current thinking.

What were some of your most popular articles at the Journal? “Anything with a list, anything that mentioned my kids, and anything on the topic of money and happiness. “

What’s changed since those days? “Go back to the late 1980s and through the 1990s, all the focus was on investing, how to build a portfolio, what’s the expected return, yada yada yada. Since then, people have realized that there’s a limit to how much we can optimize a portfolio. Instead, there’s a lot of focus on other issues, like helping people buy the right-size home, making sure they have all their estate-planning documents, making sure they have the right insurance policies, making sure they claim Social Security at the right age, and so on. There has been more focus on the psychological aspects of managing money. And finally, there’s now a focus on helping people figure out what money means to them.”

Do you remember your final article at the Journal? “When I left in 2008, I wrote a piece about three ways that money can help happiness. One, money can give you a sense of financial security. Two, it can allow you to spend your days doing what you love. And three, it can allow you to have special times with friends and family. I believe that those are the three ingredients for not only a happy financial life, but also a happy life—period. It’s certainly the three things that I’m focused on.”

Has your thinking changed about anything since your diagnosis? “In the last couple of years, I’ve become better about giving money to my kids and funding my grandchildren’s 529 plans. In retrospect, I think I should have started earlier and could have been more generous, because it’s clear to me that I’d never have been able to spend all this money I’ve accumulated, even if I did live to a ripe old age. If you’re pretty sure that your kids have good financial habits, and you’re not going to undermine their ambitions or send them on some wayward path, by all means give them money now. Why have them live with unnecessary financial anxiety? Why not make them feel a little more financially secure? I really believe that’s one of the greatest gifts that we can give to family members, this sense of financial security.”

In your writing, you’ve shared that you aren’t feeling negative emotions about your diagnosis. In fact, you wrote that your first reaction was, “I’m okay with this.” Can you say more about that? “I feel like I’ve been very fortunate. It’s not that bad things haven’t happened in my life. They have. But I’ve been able to spend my life doing what I love. I have a close-knit family, and I’ve largely been free of financial worry. All in all, I feel like I’ve managed to get a whole lot out of my life.”

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Michael Easter (author of The Comfort Crisis and Scarcity Brain) interviewed Brett McKay who has an extremely popular podcast called the “Art Of Manliness” that I’ve been listening to for many years. Brett is one of the best at interviewing authors about their new books, helping me decide if I want to read them. It was strange to hear someone asking Brett the questions. Some random thoughts from their conversation.

What’s the dumbest health trend you’ve noticed recently? Blue-light-blocking glasses. They’re useless—the research doesn’t support significant circadian disruption from blue light.

You’ve experimented extensively with health trends. What’s something you’ve changed your mind about? Low-carb diets. I got into low-carb in early days. And then I learned, wait, there’s nothing magic about low carb. You just eat fewer calories typically when you’re on low carb. But you can do that with any diet.

You’ve talked to a ton of parenting experts on podcasts. What’s your best parenting advice? Parent like a video game. In video games, if you mess up you just start from the beginning—it’s not a big deal. So if your kid makes a mistake, treat it like restarting a game—tell them not to do that again and move on. No big deal. Also, something I appreciate more and more is that kids are their own people. You can guide them, create a supportive environment, but you can’t control their personalities or outcomes. You see families where all the kids are parented the same way, but they all end up different. Why’s that? Because people are different. So do your best, love them, and let them be themselves.

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Married men are more than three times as likely to be obese as unmarried men. Though women experience weight gain in wedlock, it is on par with unmarried women.

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The U.S. is making progress against one of its most devastating public-health threats: drug overdoses.The decline is at least in part due to a drop in opioid use. A 2022 report found that opioid-use disorder increased from 2010 to 2014, then stabilized and slightly declined each year thereafter. Another reason is because the most vulnerable people have died and others have adapted. Many fentanyl users are now smoking the drug instead of injecting it, and some research shows that smoking fentanyl could come with lower risk of overdose, infections and other complications.

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Market timing is hard because, even if you get out at an opportune time, you have to nail the landing and get back in. Few people can do both. In fact, getting the first leg of the parlay right often makes it even harder to get back in because you become so attached to the loving arms of cash. The psychology of market timing becomes even more challenging when you add politics to the mix.

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A popular investment strategy being sold to investors today is the idea of getting limited upside annually on your stocks in exchange for limiting the downside. AQR discussed these in their recent article: Rebuffed: A Closer Look At Options-Based Strategies.

At the heart of the strategies examined are put options. The way puts work is straightforward: the investor pays some amount (the option premium) to protect themselves from a specific decline in a specific asset’s price over a specific period. There’s one wrinkle though: when it comes to buying puts, the price of admission is generally higher than the benefit.

let’s say an investor is less concerned with long-term returns, and more concerned with shorter-term drawdowns. Surely options-based strategies should at least help there, since a put option is literally tailor-made for this task.

Nope.

Puts are designed for very specific outcomes – they protect against a specific price level for a specific length of time. If the duration of the draw-down doesn’t align with the maturity of the option, the hoped-for protection won’t be there. This is why a strategy that buys 5% out-of-the-money puts every month can have a drawdown that’s worse than 5% – markets might fall by 4% in one month, and by another 4% the next so the options you paid for never pay you. And this is a reason 81% of the funds in Exhibit 3 weren’t able to deliver on the seemingly easy goal of downside protection (again, compared to an applicable mix of equities plus T-bills).